Mathews: Message to high school class of 2013

I’m sorry James Franco canceled at the last minute. I’m even sorrier you got me as your substitute commencement speaker, but I was offered gas money plus a free lunch.

I believe Franco planned to say that you are the future and that society has invested its hopes and resources in you.

But you already know that’s bull.

You were a public high school student in California during the past four years. Roughly one in every nine of your teachers was laid off. School days got cut. California’s per-pupil spending fell from 46th to 48th out of the 50 states. The average high school in America has 77 percent more teachers per student than the ones you attended. You had a curriculum so problematic it’s being replaced wholesale. And the quality of your teachers is a mystery, because so few of them are evaluated on their performance.

Most people, treated this shabbily, would leave. But you stayed and succeeded. You did more with less.

More than 80 percent of today’s schools score above 700 on the state’s Academic Performance Index. That compares to just 31 percent a decade ago. More of you took harder classes, particularly in science and math, and you did better in them than your predecessors. Your dropout rate has declined. And most of you in so-called “high-risk” demographics graduated despite your handicaps.

In short, you guys are tough. And you’ll need to be, particularly if you stay in California. Jobs are hard to find. Tuition fees at our public universities are double what they were when you were in middle school. The state has made it harder for you get into one of the California universities that your family’s taxes have been supporting – because it needs to admit more out-of-state students, who will pay much more than you.

But at least you’re well prepared for this new California. For your parents and grandparents, this state was about dreams and rising. But you know better. Life here now is about struggle, about fighting for what you need, about working harder in hard times, about identifying ways to win unfair games. Finding happiness won’t be about achieving the easy life but about making your struggles as beautiful as possible.

There won’t be much you can count on in this California. But you should count on your classmates. Yes, you’ll want to go in different directions. And yes, in this world, you can change your career, your family, and even your gender.

But you can never change where you went to high school.

Many Californians don’t know what municipality they grew up in or live in now; there are too many confusing, overlapping jurisdictions. But if you want to understand where they’re from, just ask where they went to high school.

So embrace your classmates even as you leave them. They’ll be able to help you make contacts, find jobs, and offer you perspective you can’t get anywhere else, not even from James Franco.

The secret to surviving this California is to keep fighting, like hell, together.

Mathews wrote this Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.